1. Lee Ranaldo & Raul Refree - Names Of North End Women
I listened to this album a lot while writing my two pieces for Spin that were partly about it, it was exciting to talk to Lee and this was a really interesting record to get into the nuts and bolts of, it's not quite like anything he's done before. Ranaldo's 3 full band 2010s albums, and his songs for Sonic Youth, have always been pretty different from his other more experimental solo stuff that combined beat poetry and tape loops and drones, but Name Of North End Women feels like it fuses together more of the different things Ranaldo does more cohesively and more successfully than anything he's done before, I especially like "Words Out Of The Haze" and "New Brain Trajectory." You can hear these records in my 2020 albums Spotify playlist.

2. Carly Pearce - Carly Pearce
Michael Busbee wrote and/or produced a lot of good pop/rock songs in the past decade before brain cancer took his life a few months ago, but his best and most enduring work, I think, was his move towards country and the two pairs of albums he made with Maren Morris and Carly Pearce, the latter of whom released her last work with Busbee on her recent self-titled album. This is a really excellent record, I'm not someone who ever thinks albums are too uptempo and my general attitude toward ballads is that a little goes a long way, but Pearce really has a gift for selling ballads, "Halfway Home" and "It Won't Always Be Like This" are nearly as good as her breakthrough single "Every Little Thing."

3. Christine and the Queens - La Vita Nuova EP
Chris was my #1 album of 2018 and "People, I've Been Sad" had me eagerly anticipating the follow-up album. This EP, and the concurrently released 13-minute music video of some of the music on the EP, are great, but I'm definitely hoping it's just a teaser and the full-length is coming sooner than later. "Mountains (We Met)" is probably my favorite off this set, her more traditional ballad stuff works so well in between the more modern beats.

4. Lil Baby - My Turn
My Turn is by far my favorite of the albums I wrote about in my Spin piece about it and the new A Boogie and NBA YoungBoy albums. I'm still a little bit on the fence about Lil Baby, to me he'll always be a more traditional and more monotone Young Thug disciple, but I do think he's a better writer and better solo artist than Gunna, and this album is solid from front to back. I think "Same Thing" is the best track on here, never was big on Tay Keith tracks but he's really growing on me, and Lil Baby/Moneybagg tracks always go off, "No Sucker" is great.

5. Brent Faiyaz - Fuck The World
Now that "Crew" has started to recede into the rearview as a possibly singular crossover moment in the careers of the 3 artists on it, I'm glad that Brent Faiyaz still seems to be steadily building a career of his own, this album or EP or something (10 songs in 26 minutes? I don't know what that even means anymore) has great production. And it's kind of funny how he sings this macho toxic shit in a really angelic voice.

6. Tink - Hopeless Romantic
Tink's momentum was squandered on that ill-fated Timbaland deal back when she was one of the few women with a foothold in mainstream rap. Now it's a much more crowded field, and she's still got some of the most talent and potential, and I'm glad she's still in there and at least dropping projects with greater frequency now. This album is almost too much on the R&B side for me, but it works for her, and "Switch'd Up" is hard.

7. Pop Smoke - Meet The Woo 2
Last month I wrote about Mac Miller and the delicate, complicated territory of the death of a musician you hadn't really listened to a lot and wanting to show respect without just doing a thirsty 180 and suddenly acting like a huge fan. With Pop Smoke it's a slightly different situation, because he was just getting started, I had listened to Meet The Woo and Meet The Woo 2 probably one time each before he died and was still kind of working out what I thought of his voice and his sound. But I've never been a big grime or UK drill guy and I have to admit it's interesting to hear a New Yorker really grab that sound and run with it and Americanize it, it's kind of like Anglophile rock bands doing impressions of British invasion bands doing impression of early U.S. rockers. It's cool hearing him pull guys like Quavo and Gunna into that territory, it's sad he won't get to take that experiment as far as it probably was going to go. "Get Back" is probably my favorite song on here even though it's the shortest song and just kinda zips by in under 2 minutes.

8. Grimes - Miss Anthropocene
I was a bit skeptical of Grimes even when she was celebrated as the hippest musician in the world, so I found it all very amusing when she became a terrible meme-loving billionaire's union-busting girlfriend. But I'm not one to hold someone's embarrassing relationships or public persona against them, so I gave the album a listen, and the opening track "So Heavy I Fell Through The Earth" is fantastic, easily my favorite thing I've ever heard from Amy Claireboucher. The rest of the album is hit-or-miss for me, there's plenty of obnoxious stuff like the first single "We Appreciate Power" and the decision to label different versions of songs as 'Art Mix' and 'Algorithm Mix,' but that opening track and a couple others are impressive.

9. 2 Chainz & T.R.U. - No Face No Case
I place very little stock in rap label compilations and group albums, but they do occasionally help familiarize you with an up-and-coming roster. And the first 2 Chainz verse that really caught my ear was back when he was Tity Boi on a DTP comp, so I was curious to see how he'd do with introducing his own The Real University imprint's new artists. Of course, they're not all really new -- Skooly has been kicking around for over a decade as part of the group Rich Kidz, who never really had a national hit but you've still heard Skooly's voice on the radio a thousand times on the "we got London On Da Track" producer tag. I definitely like the 2 Chainz and Skooly stuff here the most, but the other guys sound promising, particularly Worl.

10. Calboy - Long Live The Kings EP
I liked "Envy Me" and thought the album Calboy released last year was fine, but for some reason I was surprised by how much I like this EP, just really strong production and songwriting throughout every track, I really hear his potential to be more than a one hit wonder now.

The Worst Album of the Month: Justin Bieber - Changes
While Journals had a small but passionate fanbase, I thought Purpose kind of proved definitively that Bieber worked better in a slick EDM pop mode than trying to be an R&B singer. But here we are a half decade later and he's emerged from his weird churchy sabbatical with a creepy mustache once again trying to do R&B, and for some terrible reason R&B stations are dutifully playing "Yummy." The soulful runs he tries to do on "All Around Me" just make me cringe, the acoustic stuff like "That's What Love Is" works better but I still just don't think much of him as a vocalist.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 04, 2020 at 1:56 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.